I love Christmas and the holiday season–though you wouldn’t have guessed that Monday morning, as grumpy as I was. I was smothering under the weight of my to-do list, and taking all three of my kids grocery shopping had proven to be the last straw. I snapped at my children, frightening them, for once, into something like quiet. I hustled them to meet their dad on campus, while I went alone to the campus post office to mail a package and buy stamps. (I wasn’t yet crazy enough to brave the local post office on the Monday before Christmas).

As I sorted through the letters I’d brought with me and affixed stamps to each one, I started to calm down. I half-listened the postal workers (all young, married students) talk about their new in-laws, and I started to remember why every year I add sending Christmas cards to an already full to-do list. For me, there’s something about that moment of writing down someone’s address and remembering our shared memories and experiences–of celebrating all the people I have loved at all the different stages of my adult life: college roommates, mission companions, colleagues in graduate school, friends in various wards. To me, the act of writing and sending the card, small as it is, is a way of saying to them and to the universe at large: I love you, you are important to me and my life, and I am thinking about you.

Giving a gift.jpg

(Note: if you do not send Christmas cards, please do not read this as an indictment! It’s not. This isn’t something everyone loves equally, and it’s not always feasible, even for me).

Sometimes I wonder if I lose Christmas in the big gestures–in hunting for the perfect gift, for that one thing that will make my kids’ eyes light like stars on Christmas morning. I forget that there’s an equal joy to be found in small gifts. Maybe more, in fact, because there’s less pressure for the gift to be as meaningful for the receiver as I anticipate.

I’ve spent the last week making pomegranate jam–batches and batches of it. It started a few years ago as an experiment, and we’ve kept it going until it has become a kind of tradition for my family. Sometimes, I’m not sure why we do it–but then I remember how, the first year we delivered the jam, one of my neighbors wept, because it was the same jam her father had put on their table at Christmas.

There are probably better things I could do with that time. Certainly easier and cheaper things. But weirdly, I find stirring the simmering red, sugary liquid soothing. And today, as I walked around our neighborhood to deliver the finished jams, I felt connected to my neighbors in ways I don’t usually feel, as I go about my own routine in my own home. It’s a small thing, as gifts go, but it brings pleasure anyway. To me, and to them.  A young woman (the only member in her family), lit up when I handed her the jam and told me how much her father and sister enjoyed the jam I brought last year.  As we get closer to Christmas and things get more hectic, I want to remember this quiet joy.

What small gifts have brought you joy recently (as a giver or receiver)?


Continue reading at the original source →